The chair creaked like it had been waiting for someone to sit in it for decades. The desk, smothered in a thick coat of dust, looked as though it might dissolve into powder at the lightest touch. The mirror was scarred, its silvering peeled away in patches that left behind black gashes, as though something had clawed its way across the glass.
It had been left outside, exiled, on the rooftop of the old tenement where the wind could gnaw at it and rain could chew into its bones. But no matter how much nature tried to strip it down, the furniture clung on, like a skeleton that refused to crumble into dust. Rowan stood staring at it.
He hadn’t intended to be here tonight. His friend Kristy had dared him: “Spend an hour on the rooftop with that creepy old vanity and chair, and I’ll pay for your drinks the whole weekend.”
It was meant as a joke. Everyone in the building knew the story of the rooftop furniture. Some said it had belonged to a woman who lived in appartment 4C fifty years ago. Others whispered she had slit her throat in front of the mirror, right on that very desk. Children in the building swore they could hear the chair rocking on its own during monsoon nights. The older tenants only shook their heads and muttered about “bad luck clinging to old things.”
Rowan didn’t believe in bad luck. He believed in easy dares and free alcohol.
But now, standing here with the night wind howling around the rooftop, the city below hushed into a blanket of uneasy silence, the dare didn’t feel funny anymore.
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